Chapter 7: The Walk

After breakfast, Edward asked if I'd like to go for a walk.

"My mother will talk to you all day if you let her," he said. "She's been waiting her whole life for someone who can answer her questions about the 2020s firsthand. I thought you might want to see the neighborhood before she gets started again."

I did. The house, beautiful as it was, had begun to feel like a hospital room, a place where I was recovering from something, and I needed to move. Helen waved us off with the half-distracted warmth of someone who had already settled into a project of her own.

The neighborhood, seen from the ground, was different from what I'd glimpsed from the rooftop. From above, I'd seen towers and green canopy and the sweep of the bay. At street level, what struck me first was the quiet. Not silence. There were voices, birdsong, the sound of tools and hands on materials, someone practicing a stringed instrument in an open window. But there was no traffic noise. No engines, no horns, no sirens. No construction machinery pounding in the distance. The ambient roar that had been the constant soundtrack of my life in San Francisco, so pervasive I'd stopped hearing it, was gone.

The streets, if that was still the right word, were narrow and winding, paved in something smooth and warm underfoot. Trees lined them so densely that we walked in dappled shade even in full morning sun. The buildings rose on either side, their facades covered in the living walls I'd seen from above, green and flowering, so that the effect was less of walking through a city than of walking through a garden that happened to contain buildings. People moved around us: some walking, some cycling on machines so quiet I barely heard them pass, some sitting in doorways or on benches talking, some clearly working on physical tasks. Nobody was rushing. Nobody looked stressed.

I kept noticing small things. Two women were harvesting greens from a long raised bed that ran along the front of a building, filling baskets. A man in his seventies was spreading compost from a wheelbarrow into a garden plot, working with the careful attention of someone who intended to get it right and had all the time in the world. Further on, a group was tending a row of fruit trees, pruning and checking for disease, while nearby someone else was cleaning out a beehive frame with bare, unhurried hands. A woman was painting a mural on the side of a building while two children watched and handed her colors. Everything was being done at the pace of people who were not being timed, who were not trying to beat a deadline or hit a target or outperform the person next to them. It was work, real physical work, but it had the rhythm of something chosen rather than compelled.

"Where are we going?" I asked Edward.

"Nowhere in particular. I thought we'd walk and you could see things and ask me whatever you want." He smiled. "My mother gives answers. I'm better at just being present while you look."

He was right about that. We walked, and I looked, and the questions came when they came.

"I keep coming back to what I said yesterday morning," I told him, after we'd been walking for about fifteen minutes. "About someone like you not pulling vegetables in my time. It bothers me that I can't let it go."

"What about it?"

"It's not just that it would have seemed unusual. It's that in 2027, everything you do — the garden, the building project, the thinking-through — all of it would have been seen as a waste. People would have said you were wasting your potential. That you should be running something. Starting something. Building a company, or leading an organization, or at least getting a PhD."

Edward considered this as we walked. He didn't seem offended. He seemed to be genuinely trying to understand a concept that didn't map onto anything in his experience.

"You mean ambition as in wanting to rise above other people?"

"Wanting to achieve something. Something big. Something that puts you at the top of something."

"The top of what?"

It was such a simple question that it stopped me. The top of what? In my world, the answer had been obvious: the top of your field. The top of a company. The top of a ranking. The top of the feed. But the question, asked sincerely by a man who had no frame for it, revealed how circular the whole thing was. You climbed to get to the top, and the top was defined as the place you got to by climbing, and the climbing was the point because the top was the point because the climbing was the point.

"I don't know how to answer that," I said.

"I am ambitious," Edward said. "I try very hard, every day, to be the best person I can be. To treat people well. To be useful to my community. To learn things that make me more capable of caring for the people around me. To build things that are beautiful and durable. That's ambition, isn't it?"

"In my time, we would have called that being a good person. We wouldn't have called it ambitious."

"What's the difference?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again. There was no difference. Or rather, the difference was that in my world, being a good person was something you did on the side, after you'd achieved the things that actually mattered. It was the soft stuff, the optional stuff, the thing that didn't go on your resume. Ambition was pointed upward, toward distinction and power and recognition. Being good was horizontal, among your neighbors, and nobody gave you a prize for it.

"I think," I said slowly, "the difference is that in my time, ambition meant wanting things for yourself. And being good meant doing things for other people. And we treated the first one as more impressive than the second."

Edward nodded. "That seems like it would make people very unhappy."

"It did."

We walked in silence for a while. We'd come to a wider space, a kind of plaza, where several paths converged around a fountain. People were gathered there, sitting on stone benches, talking, eating, watching children play in the water. A young woman was playing a cello in the center of the plaza, eyes closed, completely inside the music. It was extraordinary — the kind of playing that in my time you would have heard at a concert hall, from someone who'd trained for decades and performed for thousands. Here she was playing for maybe fifteen people sitting on stone benches, and the music poured out over the open space with an intensity that stopped me in my tracks. When she finished the piece, there was a long silence and then a murmur of appreciation that was not applause, exactly, but something warmer, less performative.

"Can I ask you something?" Edward said.

"Of course."

"What did you want? When you were building your company. When you were working those eighty-hour weeks. What were you actually trying to get?"

Nobody had ever asked me that. Not even Edward Bartlett, who had loved me and known me better than anyone. I'd been asked what I was building, what my vision was, what my five-year plan was. But what I wanted? The question assumed that the wanting was separate from the working, that there was a person underneath the CEO who had desires of her own.

"I wanted to matter," I said. "I wanted to do something that made a difference. I wanted people to see me and think, 'She built that. She changed something.'"

"And did you get it?"

"I was on the cover of magazines. I gave talks to big audiences. Important investors wanted to meet me. My competitors were afraid of me." I heard myself listing these things and heard how they sounded: like a collection of reactions from other people. Not a single thing on the list was something I experienced. They were all things other people experienced about me. "I think I thought that if enough people recognized what I'd done, it would become real. The achievement would become real because other people could see it."

"And it didn't?"

"I never stopped long enough to find out."

Edward didn't say anything for a moment. We watched the children in the fountain.

"Here," he said finally, "the question isn't what you want to achieve. It's what kind of life you want to live. Whose company you want to keep. What you want to learn. What you want to build with your hands. How you want to spend a Tuesday." He paused. "Nobody is watching. Nobody is keeping score. The question is whether the life is good while you're living it, not whether it looks good from the outside."

I thought about all the Tuesday evenings I'd spent at my desk in SoMa, eating delivery sushi out of a plastic container, answering emails, watching the lights of the bay through my floor-to-ceiling windows and feeling, despite everything, a loneliness so deep it had its own weather. I'd been surrounded by people all day. I'd had a fiance who loved me, friends who admired me, employees who depended on me. And I'd been lonely in a way I couldn't name, because the loneliness wasn't about being alone. It was about living a life that was optimized for the outside view, for the graph going up and to the right, and finding that the inside of that life was as empty as the apartment I came home to.

"How you want to spend a Tuesday," I repeated.

"That's the whole question," Edward said. "Everything else is decoration."

We walked home slowly. The sun was climbing and the air was warm and the city hummed around us with the quiet industry of people taking care of their world. Edward pointed things out as we passed: the community kitchen where people cooked together, the workshop where anyone could come to build or repair things, the open-air space where people gathered for music in the evenings. We passed the half-built community space he'd mentioned, where a group was fitting beams into place. Nearby, three people were gathered around something I couldn't see, talking animatedly, gesturing at the structure and then at the air in front of them. Edward explained that they were working through a design revision with the info, debating whether the roofline should change. Everyone in the group seemed to understand the structural principles involved. They weren't waiting for an expert to tell them what was possible. They were figuring it out themselves, with the info handling the engineering calculations while they argued about what the space should feel like to walk into.

"I have a question," I said, as we climbed the last hill toward the house.

"Go ahead."

"The woman playing cello in the plaza. Do you think she's happy just playing to people in her neighborhood? Don't you think she dreams of playing to bigger audiences and being recognized nationally or internationally?"

"I doubt she does. If she spent time dreaming of something so unlikely and so unnecessary as that, I would be sad for her."

"In my time, a woman that talented would have been trying to make a career out of it. She'd be auditioning for orchestras, applying to conservatories, hustling for gigs, trying to get a manager. She'd be measuring herself against other musicians. And either she'd succeed, which would mean beating them, or she'd fail, which would mean she wasn't good enough. There was no version where she just played in a plaza and that was enough."

Edward looked at me with an expression I was beginning to recognize: the gentle bewilderment of someone who understood, intellectually, what I was describing, but couldn't feel it. Couldn't feel the weight of a world where doing something beautiful wasn't enough unless it also made you successful.

"Was it enough?" he asked. "When they succeeded? When they beat the others?"

"No," I said. "It was never enough. That was the whole problem."

We reached the house. Helen was in the garden, and she looked up when we came through the gate, and something passed between her and Edward that I couldn't read.

"How was the walk?" she asked.

"Educational," I said.

Edward laughed. It was the first time I'd heard him laugh, and it was a good sound, unguarded and warm, and I felt something shift in my chest that I wasn't ready to examine.